Introducing Microsoft Dynamics NAV’s New General Manager

As you may have heard, last week the MBS team announced that Darren Laybourn will be taking a new position as General Manager of the Outlook Mobile team at Microsoft. We also announced that I would become the new General Manager for Dynamics NAV and Mobility and continue to report to Hal Howard, who will now run all of MBS ERP R & D. As a part of my new role, my family and I will relocate from Seattle to Copenhagen, where I will work at the Microsoft Development Center Copenhagen (MDCC). In this blog post, I want to introduce myself and invite your questions or comments about these changes.

Before I do that, however, I want to thank Darren for his contribution to MBS, Dynamics NAV, and Dynamics Mobility. Darren is a true veteran of this business, having been with the combination of Great Plains Software and Microsoft Business Solutions for over 15 years. He’s had an incredible, positive impact on our customers, and he’s been a mentor for me through most of my career at Microsoft.

Let me start my introduction with a very brief bio. I’ve been with Microsoft for about six years, working on the Microsoft Business Framework, Project Fenway, and Dynamics AX. Before joining Microsoft in 2002, I ran the R & D group for a Silicon Valley start-up called Bistro that built workflow-based business applications (including financials management) for small-to-medium sized businesses. The rest of my career has been in IT consulting for large companies such as Hewlett-Packard, Charles Schwab, Ryder, Diners Club, and American Express. In short, I’ve worked on business applications my entire career and am no stranger to metadata, journal posting, and complex business value chains, on which our customers’ success is predicated.

Nonetheless, I’m new to NAV and have a lot of learning to do. But one of the first things that I’ve learned is just how passionate all the stakeholders of this product are, whether they are customers, partners, or employees. It’s people like you, the readers of this blog, that are making this product and the customers that use it, a success. Thank you for your support, and I hope I get a chance to meet you, work with you, and learn about the things you love, don’t love, or wish you could love about NAV.

In the meantime, the NAV organization will continue moving forward according to our current roadmap, including NAV 5.0 SP1 this March and NAV 6.0 at the end of the calendar year. Our priorities haven’t changed, and our commitment to the NAV product is as strong as ever. I’m excited by the future that lies ahead for NAV customers, NAV partners, and the NAV team itself!

I look forward to hearing your questions and comments about the changes.

Let me welcome you to the NAV community. I think we all liked Darren very much, but regret that he leves NAV, and we hope that you stay a bit longer in the job. The last couple of years has been marked a lot by ever changing management in the NAV team.

Welcome to the NAV community. Darren did some great work and the NAV community seems to be going from strength to strength with more activity in the forums and on the blogs than ever before. The introduction of this blog and the sustained engineering blog has also been of great benefit to me personally and I commend this more open attitude from the team. Let’s hope you can keep this going and extend the reach to give partners and end users even more direct access to the decision makers/implementors.

I am pleased you want to know what we can all do with NAV to make it better. We do love it and even now it’s pretty hot but the new version promises to be amazing and this is going to be a big year for NAV.